Apr 19, 2012

Home roasting malts

I've wanted to roast my own malts for a while, having read quite a few positive reports on beers brewed with home roasted malts. Plus, there are some malts that aren't readily available in Tassie and roasting myself is a way to get around that problem. For my first foray into roasting malt I based my efforts on a post on Barleypopmaker's Beer Blog.

There are 3 or 4 recipes I want to brew with brown malt in the recipe so I gave the brown a shot first off.

Pale malt before roasting

Starting with pale malt, I spread out 240g on an oven tray and put it in the oven for 50 minutes at 205'C, stirring every 10 minutes to get as even a roast as possible.

Brown malt finished and cooled

It turned out pretty well I reckon. The 240g reduced to 213g after roasting. 11% isn't too bad. If I recall correctly, coffee roasters tend to find a 20% reduction in weight from green to roasted. I'm guessing that green coffee beans have a higher moisture content than pale malt.

The malt tastes good and roasty and is quite evenly roasted. I'm looking forward to putting it to use. The hard part is waiting for a week or two to let it de-gas before using it. I need to plan ahead a bit more or, even better, just roast large enough quantities of a few different malts to have on hand.

Side by side

I've got a mate who's made a coffee roaster with a heat gun and a bread maker and I'm hoping to borrow it soon to roast some malt for a historical Stout recipe. It should give me more control and a more even roast.